The Listener: RIP

April 18, 2008

I’ve always enjoyed reading The Listener. It was a calm voice of reason in an increasingly nutso world of extreme views. Whenever a topic was handled, it seemed to be treated with a great deal of thought and reasoning and a lot of analysis over commentary pieces.

For those of you who aren’t journalists, let me explain the difference. It’s subtle, so feel free to read it slowly.

Analysis consists of gathering the facts, typically over a long period of time, and sticking strictly to what is proven and what is provable. Good examples of this are the Metro stories on The Unfortunate Experiment and the like. They take the heat out of the story which in turn makes it a much better read.

Comment pieces (and I say this as a former columnist) are written by chimps who are forced to have a view on things they neither know nor care about. It’s the 60 Minutes/20:20 of the print world. Typically it’s all emotion, heat and noise and ultimately empty.

As an aside, I’ve just read my first Graham Greene novel, The Quiet American, which was really very nicely done and astonishing when you realise he’s writing about the lead up to the Viet Nam war in real time.

His description of opinion writers as being hollow is bang on. I’ll add it to this post later when I find it.

The Listener has, I’m afraid, dumped analysis in favour of opinion and the steady decline in standards has just got straight off the cliff edge.

I had hoped that the arrival of David Fisher as chief news hound and Proper Reporter would help, but I fear David is a single voice fighting the good fight. I wonder how long it will be before Russell packs his bags and flees and whether the best TV reviewer in the land, Diana Wichtel, will stay.

I, however, will not.

An editor’s job is simple: to deliver the best in journalism. That’s it, really. The how of the matter is tricky (subbing, photos, layout, staff levels, remuneration, profit taking, balance) but at the end of the day newspapers and magazines are in the business of selling eyeballs to advertisers and you attract eyeballs with a juicy, tasty publication full of whatever it is the eyeballs are after. Mine have better things to do with their time.

3 Responses to “The Listener: RIP”

You must feel like you’re living in a journalistic desert at times. You can’t read the ‘Listener’, so now you can only turn to the ‘New Zealand herald’. It must be near enough to make you take up golf.